What am I doing wrong with Amazon

If someone clicks your affiliate link, to go to amazon to shop, you get commission, if they purchase something besides the product you were promoting, as long as they got there from your affiliate link.

Finding customers who are ready to buy, has shown to be more successful, than just having an assortment of products, in your case books, on your website. You have to do some research first. Amazon makes it easy to find what particular item or items are selling well. What's hot is very easy to find. I just did a browse through in the best sellers section and found 4 cookbooks in the top 20, two related to diet. So that tells you that cookbooks and niche cookbooks are what people are interested in right now. Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool and find what people are looking for by discovering the number of current searches for a particular item. For example if the finance and personal development niches are what you are really interested in, then type search queries in the google adwords keyword tool, as you would do as a consumer looking for these types of books, to discover how many people are looking for these types of books.

I hope I have given you some ideas that you can use, to hopefully start making money as an Amazon Affiliate. :-)

Have you considered other monetization strategies like Adsense or CPA?

Some great tips from gabbydeb,


Knowing what your customers interests are is key. If Amazon is your focus, do your research. Ask people or find out in that niche what people buy, what problems they come across and what solutions they have had to resolve particular issues. It's hard to say exactly why these people are not buying, is the content your providing information only? How many people respond to your blog? Are you capturing email leads from the blog and giving them what they want?

If they come for information, in most cases they come for information your already providing to them, so their is not really an intent to buy. General customers are easier to figure out, but if your focusing on businesses it gets tough as most cases they are just there for general research purposes. If you can find their needs and provide solutions to those needs, then you have potential buyers. I think just providing information on a blog is still the right motive, but if you are looking to make some kind of money, you can't just put it out on a plate for them.


Give some reviews about relevant solutions (with product suggestions) and see how it goes from there. But as I said before, research is key ESPECIALLY when your focusing with Intent To Buy customers.

Hope all goes well

I've seen people publishing book reviews with really impressive sales (probably double than mine, and I sell way higher ticket items).
I think it's all about the audience you're having (geographically speaking) and how you engage with them (meaning your content).

PS: you asked "what you're doing wrong". May I ask about what do you think you're doing ok?

The real trick to Amazon, or to any other affiliate marketing for that matter, is not just to choose the right niche and get traffic and clicks from that niche.

What you really need to do, is reach people from that niche when they're in the process of shopping.

This is especially true for Amazon where you basically need them to buy on the spot in order to be credited.

So for example, at the moment your site might get Johnny Bloggs who is extremely interested in personal finance visiting on a day when he's just curious and looking for some free information or general reading.

But what you really need to do is get Johnny Bloggs visiting on a day when he has set out to buy a book on home finance, or a piece of software, or some type of product in particular and he's in the process of actually shopping for it.

You'll get best results not just from targeting a niche that's an interest group. Rather, you should seek to provide information on products that the interest group is likely to shop for.

I always say that your job as an affiliate marketer is a lot like a retail salesperson. You talk to people who are shopping and give them information to help them buy the right thing.

But to take that analogy further, you have to make sure that as a "retail salesperson" you're standing in a "retail outlet", i.e. a location focused on products.

No retail salesperson will make much money if they're standing in a free access public library trying to sell products, no matter how good they are.

My best suggestion is that for a few weeks, you write on your site purely about specific products in your niche, imagining that you were in a retail outlet talking directly to a shopper who is interested in possibly purchasing.

And at the same time, put yourself in the position of a shopper, asking yourself what you would want to know about that product if you were considering buying it.

Turn your site into the analogous "retail outlet" more than a public access library and I'm sure you'll see results.

Try other affiliate programs as well instead of focusing only on Amazon such as Clickbank, Adsense and CPA offers. If you still want to promote books, I would suggest to review the books and add an affiliate link within the review page instead of using banners. Hope that helps. Cheers

One of the reasons why you get visitors to your blogs is that they do not want to buy books to read. They expect to find the information that they are looking for in your blog. A person may do multiple Google searches for information on "Building Wealth Through Investing" rather than buy "Personal Wealth For Dummies" where Part 3 of the book is devoted to the topic.

As someone said above you need to target buyers by using buyer keywords in articles targeted towards them. In the case of your blog on personal finance - best personal finance books has an exact search local US volume of 480. Write an article reviewing the best personal finance books and put your affiliate links in the article. If you have a good review article with a call to action, visitors to the article will click through to Amazon to buy those books.

With Amazon you need to focus on buyer keywords. Also note that selling books as an Amazon Associate brings in very little money. Focus on high-end products using buyer keywords and I think you will see better results for your efforts!